The Weiner Scandal: The Morality Play Without A Moral Or Redeeming Character

I must admit to being a bit depressed this day about our country and what has come of principles and ethics among both our politicians and citizens. There seems to be a corruption not just of power but of spirit. The Weiner scandal this morning captures my angst perfectly. There literally does not appear a single redeeming character. You have Anthony Weiner aka Carlos Danger. Then you have the other half of the power couple, Huma Abedin, who assured everyone that she still believes in him while recent reports show a questionable salary arrangement with a Clinton-connected company. Then you have Ms. Leathers, one of the other women, who is actually denouncing Weiner as betraying her when she was helping him betray his wife. Then you have Democratic voters who still have Weiner in a close second place to be elected mayor of New York. If you wonder why our politicians treat us like chumps, just take a look at the Weiner scandal.

First, let check in with Carlos Danger. Weiner is now saying that he may have had three women with whom he had a kinky Internet relationship after resigning and after his wife gave birth to their child. You may remember Weiner’s first apology where he promised to reform and focus on the love of his life (no not power): Huma. Now he suggests that she may have pushed him into the Internet arms of women because he had these relationship during a “rough time” in his marriage. That “rough time” of course was due to Weiner’s original scandal with women, some of whom never asked for pictures of his naked body and genitalia. It was the same rough time when he lied to his wife while attacking these women and reporters over the story. He now suggests that, after creating that rough time, he was forced to have additional relationships. That is like having an affair with one women and then starting affairs with three others because the first affair left him a bit estranged or uncomfortable with his wife. To a narcissist like Weiner, that makes perfect sense.

Then there is Huma. At one time, she fit the role for many as a redeeming character. The mother-to-be struggling to hold her family together with a new baby and national scandal. More recently, many have noted that she appears to have learned much at the knee of Hillary Clinton. Reports state that some donors to Weiner were trying to stay in the good graces of Clinton through Huma. While previously indicating that she almost left Weiner, she again appeared at his side after the most recent disclosures to keep their election hopes alive. I am really not sure why she fits in politically into this story. I am more interested in her working for a private company while working for the State Department in her questionable salary arrangement.

Then there is my favorite morally bankrupt character: liberal activist and Internet companion Sydney Leathers. Weiner offered Leathers to help find Leathers a condo and a job while asking her to destroy evidence of their communications. Leathers has gone public with tearful interviews as . . . wait for it. . . the victim of Weiner. She admits that she knew who he was and that he was married. The newspapers were filled with accounts of his trying to repair his marriage with a new born child. However, Leathers says she was betrayed. The 22-year-old former tanning salon worker and political blogger declared herself “disgusted” and told “Inside Edition” that “It makes me feel physically ill. I’m disgusted by him. He’s not who I thought he was.” Who exactly was that? She was knowingly corresponding with Weiner under the name of Carlos Danger behind the back of his wife. Yet, she insisted that she thought he loved her more than Huma and she believed in him.

That hurt however did not stop her, according to friends, considering selling the details of her relationship to the highest bidder. That is just good business. She just cannot understand how a man who lied to everyone, betrayed his wife with her, and engaged in kinky Internet communications:

“I just feel nauseous, literally nauseous when I see him. You get to know someone and you think they’re this other person and then you really find out they’re just kind of a sexual deviant and that’s it.”

Finally, there are the voters. Despite repeated lies and attacks from Weiner, New York voters still gave him a commanding lead in the race for Mayor. Even after the latest lies (and apology), he remains in second with 16 percent percent of Democratic voters still waiting to give him the job. He will be on the same ballot as Eliot Spitzer, who left office in disgrace as Governor after admitting to repeatedly hiring prostitutes even when he was the chief law enforcement officer putting others in jail. Spitzer is the frontrunner for Comptroller of New York. It does not matter obviously too many. Advocates cite Republicans like David Vitter or how smart these two politicians are or insist that this is personal stuff. The latter point is curious since Weiner lied to the public and attacked both these women and reporters. Spitzer betrayed his oath of office and committed crimes while incarcerating others for crimes. That is not personal stuff. That is dishonesty in public office and an utter lack of ethics.

It is the perfect modern American morality play with no moral or even moral characters.

38 thoughts on “The Weiner Scandal: The Morality Play Without A Moral Or Redeeming Character”

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i wonder if we can find out the areas of those polled? because im well aware of how the elite fake numbers for their chosen pet. until that pet falls out of favor. voter fraud is nothing new. whats new is humanity finally waking up to the fact that their votes dont count. who ever gets into office is already owned by corporations. with that said. to get into high offices you have to be s sexual deviant. ex look up skull and bones and not the misinformation sites run by the corporations. as for huma she isnt allowed to leave just yet. they havent finished using her…..hillary still loves her!!!!!! and that leathers chick is full of sugar honey iced tea and we all know it. just like the woman in the story below

she got involved with a married man broke off the relationship then went to the mans house to tell his wife and when he pushed her off his poroperty she yelled abuse then miracously somehow just a few hours later magically finds a fake facebook page with all her intimidate pictures on it. none of either story makes sense. weiner has upset someone high up in the chain and this is his punishment. just as it was the last time around. he is being shown once again that he is owned and can be revered or destroyed unless he does as told…

It has been said that when we lose our democratic principles and ethics as a nation, it will NOT be due to an outside force, but from within: “Like a rotten fruit that falls from the tree of liberty, eaten to the core by worms of corruption.”

Thank you Gina, but the way things work around here,usually, is that the other participants attempt to rip my position to shreds and point out the errors of my thinking, so I’m not quite sure how to respond, other than to say, “Finally”. (:

Advise to Weiner…Go throw away your mirror, get into therapy,go paint houses and pick up trash in the park…gain some self respect so you can raise your child….then maybe someday you can be worthy to lead others!,

hot damn! he’s gone and done it again…
How about that. Apologize and just keep on keepin’ on.
Well NY, you can have him, I don’t want him.
A morally corrupt man…boy oh boy, and lack of character even better…you can keep him… far away from me.

I know this blog entry is about Weiner. He’s got a sickness and his actions should rightly take him out of contention for office – until he gets treatment. But my earlier post in this thread takes exception to Turley’s attempt to lump Spitzer in with Weiner. Only on the most superficial level do the two equate, ie both are married politicians who were forced from office for sexual scandals. There the similarities end. Spitzer did an exemplary job as Attorney General, while the nature of his scandalous behavior has nothing remotely in common with that of Weiner’s, except that it was a form sexual behavior.

Spitzer, in my mind, has the potential to perform true public service. I’m surprised that someone with as fine a legal mind as JT is not willing to make the distinction between Weiner’s conduct, who appears to be truly sick, and Spitzer, who has merely exhibited an all too human weakness.

Okay this is my last excerpt from this article, :o) so I will extract an excerpt from this excerpt and highlight it here.

“War has become a mode of sovereignty and rule, eroding the distinction between war and peace. Increasingly fed by a moral and political hysteria, warlike values produce and endorse shared fears as the primary register of social relations.”

The United States has become addicted to violence, and this dependency is fueled increasingly by its willingness to wage war at home and abroad. War in this instance is not merely the outgrowth of polices designed to protect the security and well-being of the United States. It is also, as C. Wright Mills pointed out, part of a “military metaphysics” – a complex of forces that includes corporations, defense industries, politicians, financial institutions and universities.[29] War provides jobs, profits, political payoffs, research funds, and forms of political and economic power that reach into every aspect of society. War is also one of the nation’s most honored virtues, and its militaristic values now bear down on almost every aspect of American life.[30] As modern society is formed against the backdrop of a permanent war zone, a carceral state and hyper-militarism, the social stature of the military and soldiers has risen. As Michael Hardt and Tony Negri have pointed out, “In the United States, rising esteem for the military in uniform corresponds to the growing militarization of the society as a whole. All of this despite repeated revelations of the illegality and immorality of the military’s own incarceration systems, from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib, whose systematic practices border on if not actually constitute torture.”[31]The state of exception in the United States, in particular, has become permanent and promises no end. War has become a mode of sovereignty and rule, eroding the distinction between war and peace. Increasingly fed by a moral and political hysteria, warlike values produce and endorse shared fears as the primary register of social relations.

What has changed about an entire generation of young people includes not only neoliberal society’s disinvestment in youth and the lasting fate of downward mobility, but also the fact that youth live in a commercially carpet-bombed and commodified environment that is unlike anything experienced by those of previous generations. Nothing has prepared this generation for the inhospitable and savage new world of commodification, privatization, joblessness, frustrated hopes and stillborn projects. [12] Commercials provide the primary content for their dreams, relations to others, identities and sense of agency. There appears to be no space outside the panoptican of commercial barbarism and casino capitalism. The present generation has been born into a throwaway society of consumers in which both goods and young people are increasingly objectified and disposable. Young people now reside in a world in which there are few public spheres or social spaces autonomous from the reach of the market, warfare state, debtfare, and sprawling tentacles of what is ominously called the Department of Homeland Security.

] What many commentators have missed in the ongoing attack on Edward Snowden is not that he uncovered information that made clear how corrupt and intrusive the American government has become – how willing it is to engage in vast crimes against the American public. His real “crime” is that he demonstrated how knowledge can be used to empower people, to get them to think as critically engaged citizens rather than assume that knowledge and education are merely about the learning of skills – a reductive concept that substitutes training for education and reinforces the flight from reason and the goose-stepping reflexes of an authoritarian mindset.

Great article from alternet. …. My quick two cents, the politicians do it because they can, they get away with it because no one stops them, they get re-elected because there is no choice. Both parties have their monopoly with the divided electorate. The Bank Wallst corporatocracy have the exact government they want. .

These anti-public intellectuals are part of a disimagination machine that solidifies the power of the rich and the structures of the military-industrial-surveillance-academic complex by presenting the ideologies, institutions and relations of the powerful as commonsense. [1] For instance, the historical legacies of resistance to racism, militarism, privatization and panoptical surveillance have long been forgotten and made invisible in the current assumption that Americans now live in a democratic, post-racial society. The cheerleaders for neoliberalism work hard to normalize dominant institutions and relations of power through a vocabulary and public pedagogy that create market-driven subjects, modes of consciousness, and ways of understanding the world that promote accommodation, quietism and passivity. Social solidarities are torn apart, furthering the retreat into orbits of the private that undermine those spaces that nurture non-commodified knowledge, values, critical exchange and civic literacy. The pedagogy of authoritarianism is alive and well in the United States, and its repression of public memory takes place not only through the screen culture and institutional apparatuses of conformity, but is also reproduced through a culture of fear and a carceral state that imprisons more people than any other country in the world

Reverend Billy Graham is right. What we need in this country is Revival —
just don’t look to Ken Starr or anyone else affiliated with Baylor University.
The biggest sinners and hypocrites in Texas are in Waco, Texas.

You’re right! But: From the president on down we have criminal acts galore–or what used to be criminal, like treating the constitution as just a piece of paper, not to mention illegal profiteering from office, &c. The government is all but totally corrupt so people can be forgiven for choosing the kind of behaviors they will accept above others who have not been found out as yet.